Adventures Around the Campus
Last night in my dream I was flying around the UMass campus in a jetpack. The act of flying with it consisted of pressing these tiny buttons put upon tiny handheld handles on sticks on either side of my body. For the reason that they were tiny, the handles were hard to grip and therefore when taking my hands off of them while flying I became nervous, hoping I could put my hands to them again before the jetpack lost too much altitude. I scarcely went above 20-30 feet but stayed relatively close to the ground noting the intrigued looks of people below stopping to look up at my flight. I flew towards the red sculpture in the center of the Fine Arts Building plaza and attempted to fly up it, but upon looking up it’s size was now many times that which it is was before and I came back down to the ground. A friend I once had in middle school grabbed hold of the back of my shirt near my neck and when I quickly accelerated towards a building to lose him he held on and just bore a wide grin. I asked him how he had kept his body perpendicular to the ground through that (for it was against typical inertial laws) and he just laughed more and I think I laughed a bit too. At this point the dream ushered me forth in a discontinuous jump to the 26th floor of the DuBois library, in a room which seemed to house artifacts and decor befitting a 20’s to 30’s museum exhibition. A group of men in suits and hats were talking about an object in the room nearer the window side: a table with a rectangular prism glass covering, as is the case in many museum exhibits, and inside a book with unusual pages. On the innermost visible page there was a picture of a man with a suit and tie and hat like the men who were in the room, but he had no face, for that part was cut out of the paper. Above this book there was another book turned a different page which portrayed an owl’s face - presumably these books were identical so that when lining up two certain pages the man with the suit would have the face of an owl. Next one of the men nearest me held out a large but remarkably preserved dead moth on it’s back in his hand to add to the other identical dead moth on top of the aforementioned display case. I remember thinking “Wow, your pockets must be large to not chance upon something so pretty by fumbling around”, or something along those terms anyway. At this I went over to the windows noting one of them was upon big enough for me to go out through. I still had the jetpack and I intended to fly to the ground but after looking out at how far below the ground was I became scared and decided not to. An old man (I could tell he was of age for he was sitting down, was mostly bald, and had grey hair) told me “it’s better you don’t go out that window ‘cause the window sill might break as you’re taking off”. I was pretty thankful at this, because it meant I now had a good reason to stay inside and no-one had to know the real reason was because I was afraid of the height. So I exited the exhibition room with the old man and the men in suits out a wooden door to find a spiral stairwell. I thought it might be easier to go down the center if possible with my jetpack so I tried to do that and found that only my right thruster was functional because I had used up nearly all the fuel in my left one as a result of flying around the UMass campus. am amazed at this dream’s level of consistency. The right thruster alone could not provide proper trust and therefore I did not get more than a foot off the ground before plopping back down again. (I then mused on how fortunate I was I had not tried to exit through that window, because the jetpack would certainly had not been enough to get me down safely.) So I tried to walk down the spiral staircase when I noticed it gets smaller the farther I go down, and now my legs were tangled into the handrails! This spiral staircase was like a fire escape and not a thick solid construction, so there was a lot of places to trip yourself up if you weren’t careful. It was at this point that the men with suits in the room above opened the door and I felt like I should get away from them, so I went towards the nearest wooden door which was on the level of the next floor. The problem was my legs were still tangled so I reached for the door and the wireframe staircase buckled and bent and gave way though the frame was at least an inch thick in many places. I escaped through this door where across the cement floor I found an elevator and pushed a button. The elevator door opened very quickly after that and I went in. Upon getting in however I found this elevator to be unlike any other elevator I had been in, with a confusing array of devices and buttons. There was no clear button panel for the floors but instead many disparate switches and buttons responsible for anything but going to your intended floor. For instance, I remember a row of red buttons whose function was nothing more than to play different classical pieces as ambience in the elevator. (They had French names and I believe one of them was by Charles Valentin Alkan.) I didn’t know how to operate the elevator so I was thankful when the door closed as soon I went in so the men in suits wouldn’t catch up to me. - The problem was, the elevator was going up, not down, which wasn’t where I wanted to go! I toyed with a large circular metal dial to my right which had in neat black capital letters on the elevator wall the phrase “FINE TUNING” above it and on the side of the thick dial there was the name of a company who began with the letter S and their address and contact information. (It ended in “& Sons” I believe.) The dial was at about 3.75 to 3.8 so I changed it and turned it up figuring this would somehow send me in the right direction. It did not, so I changed it back to (hopefully) where it was at before. Every time I looked at the control panels of the elevator the buttons changed and new ones arose where the old ones once were. One button read “HELP” and I pressed it, triggering red lights to flash and alarms to sound but still not sending me down. Another button I pressed was one with the figure of a person (such as you might see in “caution - wet floor” signs or crosswalk signs) walking down a fiery set of stairs and I pressed the button. At last the doors opened, though it was now the next floor up and I saw a group of construction workers in orange helmets and neon green vests speaking. I was afraid the elevator would keep going up and somehow drop me off the top of the building so I asked the manager of these construction workers how to get higher in the elevator, and he said “You just ---”. The rest of what he said was lost for the men around him were talking and besides that I couldn’t tell if he was talking to them or me since his focus of attention seemed to vacillate so. I believe I asked him this again but the same “reply” was given. So I again boarded the elevator and felt it ascend. I was nervous and was certain the elevator was going to drop off the building when I felt it tip back - only for the most curious thing to happen! As it turns out, the elevator was turning upside-down, so that it traveled to a shaft that was to the side of the shaft I was once in along a giant chain link like the type in a bike. This elevator did not move according to an up-and-down cable in the center, but was affixed to two chain loops that spanned the entire height of the building and brought the elevator in a full circuit through two shafts. So in order to go down, I’d have to go to the very top, then the elevator would flip and I could go back down. is a real life contraption called the “paternoster lift” and was used in the early 20th century before being phased out for safety concerns. I oriented my body so that I was right-side up and awaited my going down. Then I realized that even though the elevator would eventually reach the ground area (I intended to go to the lowermost floor housing the public computer lab rather than the lobby) I did not know a button to open the doors. So I expected to use the same trick as before and press one of the emergency buttons to get off, but I could not find the same red button with the figure running down a burning stairwell and as I was searching for it I woke up in real life. Thusly the dream ended. - At least my state of unconsciousness did. When I awoke I was not yet in a fully awake state and therefore hallucinated that a piece of lint near me on my bed was a small fly which flew a few inches then landed again. When more alert however I realized it was just a piece of lint. Date Dreamed: Wednesday, August 8, 2018 Category:Dreams Category:Vendellium's Dreams